FITS Newsletter Home

Table of Contents:

• From Blackboard to Moodle
• FITS Spring Moodle Workshop - March 15th
  
• Two New Moodle Features
• Utilizing START for Class Projects
  
• Staff Spotlight: Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist and Moodle Support Coordinator
  

Contributed by Art Evans Laurel H Turk, Professor of Modern Languages and Professor of Modern Languages

I have two very large Blackboards, developed over several years. And I now find myself (somewhat grumpily) in the process of having to “migrate” them to Moodle. One course is my Honor Scholar FY seminar on science fiction; the other is an upper-level French seminar on the history of French song (1940-present). Scheduled to teach the latter course again this spring, I spent most of Winter Term 2008 converting the materials for this French song class from Blackboard to Moodle. Here are some things I learned.

Moodle’s three-column architecture is very different from Blackboard’s. Whereas Blackboard requires a kind “Russian nesting dolls” structure for organizing your materials (box-within-a-box-within-a-box), Moodle’s structure is more wide-open: the main “topic” boxes containing your materials are next to one another, running vertically down the screen. Personally, I don’t care much for Moodle’s three-column interface, but it’s open structure makes it much easier to navigate through the entire site. It is important to realize, in switching over to Moodle, that you will probably need to make some basic design changes to your original Blackboard course.

I found that there is no easy way to import foreign-language files from Blackboard to Moodle without a lot of cleanup. Some materials can be imported directly into Moodle’s “Files” repository. But, for me, opening both systems side-by-side and simply cutting and pasting from one to the other proved to be the fastest and most reliable way. Blackboard has always been notoriously unstable concerning accents and other diacriticals (I had to reenter them twice over the past three years); Moodle does not seem to have this problem, happily.

In addition to text and graphics, this French song course also contains approximately 250 music recordings in “streaming audio” format. These presented a special challenge. They were not functioning well in Blackboard—e.g., students using Macs could not make them work properly and sometimes, even in Windows, they tended to activate at odd times. To solve this problem, the original CDs were re-ripped, and the sound files saved in .mp3 format and then stored on a special streaming server (thanks to Roni Pejril). Throughout this process I discovered that Moodle offered one improvement over Blackboard in that the button to activate each song now could be placed on the same page as the song’s lyrics, allowing the student to follow along while listening. Bottom line: we have so far experienced no glitches at all with the “streaming audio” component of this class, a constant source of difficulty when they were in Blackboard.

I also include daily online mini-quizzes on each of the 50+ singer-songwriters featured in this Moodle site. These quizzes are short, consist of several true-false questions, and are timed at 5 minutes each. Since certain upgrades were added to Moodle in January, these quizzes and the gradebook have also been working perfectly. The students seem especially to appreciate the “countdown clock” that appears on the screen when they are taking a quiz, letting them know exactly how much time they have remaining.

I have not yet experimented with many of the tools available in Moodle (wikis, forums, workshops, etc.). But I must confess that the more I work with Moodle, the less grumpy I am becoming about having to migrate away from Blackboard.

Contributed by Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist & Moodle Support Coordinator

This year’s FITS Spring Workshop will be on Saturday, March 15th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Julian Center.

The workshop will focus on Moodle and provide opportunities for both faculty members just starting to use Moodle as well as those wishing to enhance their current Moodle expertise. Breakout sessions will focus on topics such as the Moodle gradebook, steps in Moodle page design, an introduction to Moodle, copyright issues, and more. Also, there will be hands-on sessions where participants can work on their individual course with the aid of instructional technologists. By the end of the workshop, participants should feel comfortable enough with Moodle to build course sites.

To register for the 2008 FITS Spring Workshop on March 15th, please complete the short survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB227HQ7YZKGC by March 11, 2008. Your feedback on this survey will help us identify on which features to focus during breakout sessions.

Also, we regret that this workshop is scheduled on the same date as the Women in Science Reunion. If you are involved with Women in Science, we encourage you to attend the reunion and we will be happy to find another time to help you with Moodle. Additional Moodle opportunities are listed at http://www.depauw.edu/univ/fits/events/events.asp#oncampus. You are also welcome to email us at moodle@depauw.edu to request a department visit or a one-on-one session.

We hope to see you there!

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START

During winter term, FITS added two new enhancements to Moodle that faculty members expressed great interest in at the Moodle User Group (MUG) discussion sessions.

Gradebook Plus add-on

The “out of the box” Moodle gradebook proved functional, but was limited in that you could only add an assignment generated outside of Moodle by adding an “offline activity”, which adds an icon to the course site. While these offline activity icons could serve as reminders to students, they also can clutter up the course space. Another limitation was the original gradebook did not allow for easy grade changes. Faculty members wanting to change a grade had to open the submitted assignment to change the grade. This was somewhat unintuitive and an inconvenient step for instructors who naturally would go to the gradebook to make grade changes.

The new gradebook,” Gradebook Plus,” solves both of these problems. First, it has a “Manage Graded Events” tab. This allows instructors to add an assignment to the gradebook without the need for an offline activity. This enhancement did not replace the offline activity option, as some users still use it as a reminder tool for students. Second, the new gradebook has an “Edit Grades” tab. When you click on this tab, the gradebook loads the grades into editable text boxes where you can change a grade quickly and easily without having to leave the gradebook to go to an individual assignment.

If “use advanced options” is turned on, you will see 2 new tabs, Edit Grades and Manage Grade Events.

Finally, the new gradebook came with enhanced statistics as a fringe benefit. You can now view statistics on individual assignments as well as the overall final grades by clicking on the stats button next to the assignment. Students can also view these statistics if they wish.

The Feedback Module

The Feedback Module, our newest enhancement to Moodle, offers you the ability to build customized surveys for your students. You can choose from an assortment of different online question types to build your survey. You can also choose to make your survey anonymous and show or withhold results with the students. This could be a great way to gather quick informal feedback, or even build your own course evaluation survey.

If you have any questions about these new features or Moodle in general, please email moodle@depauw.edu.

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START

Student Technology Assessment and Resources Training (START) offers more than just technology support for students. It also offers customized training sessions for your students on various course projects that use technology.

For large projects, we encourage interested faculty members to contact us well in advance to allow enough time to put together a project team that can provide the best possible support. A model team would consist of the instructor who provides their learning goals and objectives and serves as the content expert, a technologist whose expertise aligns with the technology that will be used, support staff who, along with conducting workshops, offer open lab times to support students with technical questions should they have any. Depending on the scope of the projects, built in check points and regular team meetings might be set up to confirm that we are on target to meet the learning objectives of the projects and to evaluate the effectiveness of the support and training sessions.

If you have a technology driven projected planed for one of your classes and would like a dedicated workshop and support team, please contact start@depauw.edu to set up a consultation.

Expertise: Moodle, DyKnow, Project Management, Microsoft Office, Databases, Reflective Writing.

Biography: Lynda joined FITS in September 2001. She earned an associate of applied science degree in Computer Information Systems from IVY Tech State College in December 2005. Her greatest achievement is being a mom to three terrific sons – a U.S. Marine, a beekeeper, and a video game enthusiast. Lynda enjoys spending time with her kids, cooking, writing, crocheting, and taking walks on the beach (which can be a challenge living in Indiana).

Fun Fact: Lynda once took tae-kwon-do lessons with her children.